They held the feast in the Great Pyramid of Meereen, on the highest terrace, where the desert wind came up hot and dry off the Skahazadhan and the stars were very close.

Aelya had not wanted a feast. Aelya had wanted, privately, to spend her eighteenth nameday in a small room with her sister and a bottle of Arbor gold and no one else in the world. But Missandei had pointed out — gently, over breakfast three weeks before — that the freedmen of three cities would be wounded if their queens did not mark the day, and that a queen who refused her people's love was a queen who would not keep it.

So they held a feast.

There were seven courses. There were acrobats from Qarth and musicians from Lys and a great silver cake in the shape of a dragon that Morghon regarded with deep professional interest before Aelya physically interposed herself between him and the dessert table. There were speeches. Grey Worm gave one, short and formal and so quietly proud that Missandei — standing beside him, not quite touching, in the careful way they had been not-quite-touching for six months now — had to look at the floor for a moment. Illyrio's letter of felicitation, delivered by raven that morning, ran to fourteen pages and had to be read aloud in shifts.

And through all of it Aelya was aware, with a distracting bright awareness, of Dany at her side.

Her sister was wearing red.

Dany did not usually wear red. Dany wore white, or pale blue, or the soft greys Aelya teased her about; red was Aelya's colour, and they had an unspoken arrangement about it. Tonight Dany had come down to dinner in a gown of deep Myrish red with gold at the throat and gold at the cuffs, her silver hair loose down her back in the old Valyrian style, and Aelya had taken one look at her across the terrace and forgotten, briefly, a speech she had been practising for two days.

Dany had noticed. Dany had smiled — a small private smile, not for the crowd — and taken her seat beside her sister, and reached under the table, and laced their fingers together.

She had not let go for three hours.

It was past midnight when the guests began, at last, to drift away.

Grey Worm made his bow and withdrew. Missandei walked him to the stairs, which she had not done before at any public event, and they stood talking in low voices for several minutes before she came back alone with a very slight flush on her dark cheeks. Aelya, who had decided months ago to pretend she did not see any of this until Missandei chose to mention it, did not mention it.

Illyrio's ambassador bowed himself out. The Qartheen acrobats were fed and sent to bed. The musicians played one last song — a Valyrian lullaby that Willem Darry had sung to them both when they were small — and then they, too, withdrew.

At last there was only Aelya and Dany on the high terrace, and the stars, and the wind.

And the dragons.

Morghon was asleep on a heated flagstone the stewards had prepared for him specifically. Sōvegon and Ēdrugon were perched on the parapet above, watching the desert with the patient predatory attention of owls. Dany's three had gone hunting at dusk and were still out; Drogon's distant shriek carried faintly from somewhere over the bay.

Dany stood up.

She crossed to the edge of the terrace and put her hands on the warm stone of the parapet and looked out over Meereen — over the fires and the torches and the freedmen still dancing in the plazas below — and Aelya watched the wind move her sister's hair and thought, I have built all of this for her. Every stone of it. Every freed slave and every burned master and every mile of road. I did not know it when I started. I know it now.

She stood up and went to the parapet and stood beside her.

"Dany," she said.

"Mm."

"You said. Three years ago. In the tower on Dragonstone."

Dany went very still.

"You said to ask you again in three years."

"I remember."

"It has been three years."

Dany did not turn her head. She kept looking out over the city. Her hand on the parapet was not quite steady.

"Yes," she whispered. "It has."

Aelya's mouth was dry. She had planned this conversation — had rehearsed it, absurdly, while riding Morghon over the Yunkish plains, while lying awake in a tent outside Meereen, while bathing in the great copper tub Missandei had installed in her chambers. She had a speech. She had, in fact, several speeches. All of them left her at once.

"Dany," she said. "What did you want to ask me. That night."

Dany drew a breath. She let it out slowly. She turned.

Her sister's face in the torchlight was very grave, and very young, and not afraid.

"I wanted to ask you," Daenerys said, "whether, when we were old enough — whether you would be mine. The way the old Targaryens were. Husband and wife, and brother-sister, and — and everything. I wanted to ask whether we could be that. I have wanted to ask since I was fourteen years old, Aelya, and I have not asked because I was afraid you would say no, and I could not — I could not have borne it. So I did not ask. I waited. I have waited."

She took one small step closer.

"I am asking now."

Aelya could not, for a moment, speak.

She reached up — her hand was shaking, she noticed distantly, as though it belonged to someone else — and she laid her palm against her sister's cheek, and Dany's eyes closed and she turned her face into the touch.

"Yes," Aelya said.

"Yes?"

"Yes. Yes, Dany. Yes. I have loved you since we were in the cradle. I have loved you for two lifetimes. There has never been a day I would have said anything but yes."

Dany made a small broken sound.

Aelya kissed her.

It was not the kiss of sisters. It was the kiss of two women who had been waiting a very long time, who had walked out of a pyre together naked and unburned, who had freed three cities and raised six dragons and buried a brother between them, and who had known — both of them — since they were children in a house with a red door, that they were each other's. Dany's mouth opened under hers and Dany's hands came up into her hair and Dany was crying, silently, with her eyes closed, and Aelya was crying too, and the wind on the high terrace moved around them hot and dry and smelling of smoke.

When they broke apart Dany pressed her forehead against Aelya's, the way she had since they were small.

"Take me to bed," she whispered. "Wife. Sister. Please."

Aelya, unsteady and undone, took her sister's hand and led her inside.

‍

[The rest of the night is theirs, and passes behind a closed door: two silver women learning each other at last, with all the heat and tenderness of a thing waited for half a lifetime, and no witness but the dragons on the parapet and the wind off the bay.]